Taboola Raises $15M Following Dramatic Growth in 2012

NEW YORK, Feb. 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Taboola, the leading NY-based content-distribution and monetization platform, announced today that it has completed a $15 Million Series D round of funding. The funding was led by Pitango VC with participation from existing investors Evergreen Venture Partners, WGI Group and Marker.

This announcement comes 6 months after the company had announced a $10M funding round led by Marker, and a few weeks after the company reported marquee customers leveraging its article and slideshow recommendation platform. Driven by market demand, the company has leveraged its innovative video-predictive technology to deliver a "one-stop shop" solution for content-recommendation, monetization, and distribution that is already being used by Bloomberg, The Weather Channel, BusinessWeek, and others.

Taboola, founded in 2007, is the fastest-growing content-recommendation company on the web, connecting people with content they may like. The company's success is built on its unique EngageRank™, technology. EngageRank algorithms quantify how users interact with content in real-time in order to accurately predict and recommend content of interest to them, whether those are from the site the user is currently on or from around the web.

Similar to content-networks such as Twitter Promoted Tweets, promoting tweets on Twitter.com, or Facebook Promoted Stories, promoting content on Facebook.com news feed - Taboola operates a marketplace where high quality content owners such as publishers and brands can bid to have their content distributed on top publishers sites, all around the web. Taboola's marketplace includes hundreds of thousands of content items at any given moment.

Taboola's technology serves 1.5 Billion recommendations daily on sites such as Time.com, NY Times, Fox Broadcasting, and USAToday. The company is focused on building the world's leading engine to discover content people may like, and allowing content owners to gain a significant ROI on their content business.

"Pitango's success in media investments and its vision to build world-leading companies makes it a great partner for Taboola," said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola. "It's been an incredible year for Taboola. We've grown 7.5x in revenue, launched a successful mobile business, and brought on board key executives to join the team."

Recent leadership additions include Nadav Rosenberg (formerly of Groupon and McKinsey & Company) as Taboola's European GM and Eldad Maniv (formerly of Kaltura, Zend and BMC Software) as President & COO.

"Taboola is creating a new, innovative, and scalable alternative using high quality content," said Chemi Peres, Managing General Partner & Co-Founder at Pitango. "We believe that Content Marketing is going to take meaningful part in publishers and advertisers future monetization, and Taboola's vision, together with its outstanding founding team, has a real opportunity to scale and build a leader in the category."

According to Singolda, the funds will be used to fuel the company's continued rapid growth, international expansion, and development of the next-generation of content-distribution.

"I started the company with a long-term vision to enable content-owners around the world to tell their stories to the right audience, whether the content owners are publishers, brands or even musicians," adds Singolda. "My dad is a guitarist, and it took him 30 years to build an audience that cares to listen, while Justin Bieber became famous after uploading a video to YouTube and getting discovered by a significant amount of viewers. We all have stories to tell; the only reason people are not searching for them yet is because they don't know they exist. That's not how it is supposed to be."

About Taboola

Taboola is widely recognized as the world's leading content distribution and monetization platform, connecting people with content they may like. Taboola reaches over 200M uniques a month seeing Taboola recommendations, and over a 1.5 billion recommendations served every day. Read more about Taboola on: http://www.taboola.com.

Taboola's service is used by publishers to re-circulate their own traffic by generating personalized on-site content recommendations. Taboola also operates a marketplace, enabling publishers, brands, and agencies to acquire high quality traffic and unique-users by recommending their content as third party content on Taboola's network of Tier 1 publishers.

About Pitango Venture Capital (www.pitango.com)Pitango Venture Capital, the leading venture capital firm in Israel, has been investing in technology entrepreneurs since 1993. With offices in Israel and Silicon Valley, California, Pitango currently manages several venture funds totaling over $1.5 Billion in committed capital invested in more than 150 companies to date, among them companies that have gone public or have been acquired such as Anobit, acquired by Apple; Aeroscout, acquired by Stanley Healthcare Solutions; Provigent and Dune Networks, both acquired by Broadcom; Convergin; Optonol, acquired by Alcon; Ventor, acquired by Medtronic.

Pitango invests in high-growth companies in various stages, from seed and early stages to growth and late-stage, and supports them as they grow. Pitango's investment focus includes: Communications; Networking & Storage; Wireless, Cellular and Mobile technologies; Enterprise Software, Internet and Media; Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Clean Technologies.